Friday, 11 January 2008

Sticky Date Pudding for All, Not Just the Rich!

Only eighty hours of Detox Program '08 to go, whereafter: sticky date pudding, here I come. It occurs to me, though, that it may not be entirely wise to spend Monday night home alone with a 9-inch wide pudding (i.e., every chance that I'll wake up on Tuesday morning dead, with a slick of syrup running down my chin), so anyone (of sound character) who wants to join me at Hôtel Harlot (in Thornbury) to partake of sticky date pudding (home-made, one performance only) on Monday evening, please email lexicon.harlot@gmail.com for further details.

34 comments:

Hmm, well, y'know, having thought about it long and hard, I have to say that it'd be absolutely irresponsible of us local blogsters to leave you to your own devices, aye? I mean, who could resist, nay, ignore a plaintive request for assistance and support, such as the one issued above? Or at least, who could do so, and simultaneously hope to avoid the immense and probably immediate karmic reverberations (mmmm, reverberating puddin')?

Herr Martinkus, Keef Windschuttle is a sometime lefty, but turned conservative since the 90s. He's written a number of notorious essays attempting to disprove most claims of Aboriginal genocide, including a 3 volume work-in-progress about black/white relations (first has been published, the other two have yet to be published.) He's also inspired any number of critics in the history department and is apparently a central figure in the culture wars/history wars (whatever they are).

Oh, and our Keef is also soon to be the editor of right-wing rag Quadrant. (I quite like the magazine, actually, but remain suspicious about Keefy's suitability as editor).

Windschuttle is a former devotee of Pol Pot's. Sometime in the 90s, he abandoned the far left for the right (probably because some neo-cons in America wrote a nice review of his book about why Postmodernism Is Bad) and reinvented himself as Australia's premier apologist for imperialism. He preceeded to write The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which asserts (a) that there was no attempted genocide in Tasmania (and that there were no more than 120 murders of indigenous Tasmanians between 1803 and 1838) and (b) it's an academic conspiracy that tells you otherwise. I forgot to read his stupid book when it was published half a decade ago, and have only just caught up, so am belatedly joining in the fray.

Eyrie, sorry you no can come. I still have most of a box of tea from last time.

Yer, but we both left out the best bits, like how when he was editor of Sydney Uni's student paper Honi Soit in the 1960s, he claims to have been misled by a CIA operative to post the recipe for LSD in the paper. (Odd thing for the CIA to do, but there you go.)

How nice to be young enough to have missed the most nauseating passages in the most recent bout of the culture/history wars! Was all that "Fabrication" business really so long ago? It makes one feel quite old! I think it's all really moved on to climate change now. The things they say about climate change scientists are very similar to the things they were saying about historians back then- that it's all some elaborate conspiracy to secure grants and funding (I can think of *many* more lucrative ways of being a crook!).

High-grade: exactly. I get tea-drunk on half a cup, so I've tried to take it slowly.

If you'd been paying attention to your weekly unsolicited Citizens Electoral Council spam, you'd realise that the global warming swindle was the work of the British financial oligarchies, which have also perpetuated such untruths as "Too much red meat increases the likelihood of developing bowel cancer" and "You can't turn the rivers inland".

Should I be lucky enough to return the favour at some point I will have herbal tea at the ready. Or maybe Turkish apple- do you like that? It's very sweet, a good option for the non-tea drinker at a high tea, so long as they're a sugar demon.

Sadly, I receive no spam from CEC. But on my recent travels I did stay with friends in Devon, one of whom studies plankton in relation to climate change. Lacking the heads up from CEC, I neglected to ask him about those British finanical oligarchies. What a wasted opportunity!

When I was a cleaner at Melbourne University Honi Soit was student newspaper there too. I was editor for three days. Well left or right, it don't matter, we're all big earners in the end. And if you don't like Windshuttle get a Donald Horne doll -very predictable, press its belly and it says all the right things.

Sticky Date Pudding after a detox will kill you. In the interest of your continuing colonic health I insist that you have this pudding delivered to me and I will undertake to dispose of it responsibly.

The only thing better than a sticky date pudding is a sticky date. That's right. And Miss Jahteh watch out, your next pudding will land you in a wheelchair. I only tell you this as a good friend. Okay?

RH, you're welcome to comment here, but not to insult other folks on the grounds of their bodies. Many of us spend our lives feeling inadequate because our bodies don't measure up to others' (or our own) standards, whether those are standards of height or health or width or hairiness or unhairiness or symmetrical breastedness or large genitaledness or what-have-you. Feeling inadequate is no fun, nor is it good for one's health. I would like this to be a space where people are not made to feel inadequate, where they are not judged or belittled for their bodies.

If there's going to be any judging round here, it will be based strictly on a new system I am devising in partnership with the Sydney Institute, called the Windschuttle Quotient.

"When I was a cleaner at Melbourne University Honi Soit was student newspaper there too. I was editor for three days."

You edited "Honi Soit" at Melb Uni for three days?!

Had you stayed a little longer you might have discovered that the Melb Uni student newspaper you should have been editing was called "Farrago", but as the quote goes (or should have gone) "the CIA moves in mysterious ways, it's blunders to behold".

I have not insulted Jahteh at all, I've known her a long time; she makes that sort of joke about herself. I never have. The real gripe is my comment about Horne. Jahteh is an excuse. And for goodness sake, most people would know I've never been to university (or secondary school) but does it matter that I don't know the name of Melb uni's stupid rag? A joke is a joke, that's all.Accuracy is for pinheads.

Just leaving an N.B. here, before I toddle off to me allocated sleepin' space. The aforementioned informational integer contains, in its infinite potentiality, the following:

The Lexicon Harlot makes a fuck-off awesome sticky date pudding, a sublime pizza-type pastry-thing of indeterminate nature and identity (though I suspect artichoke hearts may have been involved, at a guess, and I'm sure I saw halved mushrooms), and an intriguingly, almost suspiciously good, salad-what-contains-unidentifiable-yummies. I feel honored to have sampled these goodies, and shall remain so for quite some time.

On that other matter, glad noone's been offended. I've obviously stuck my foots into a longstanding tease party. I understand that teasing like this can be motivated by affection, amongst other things, but, as with all teasing, there's a fine line between affection disguised as meanness and meanness disguised as affection. And there's always the possibility that the speaker will think they're standing on one side of the line, while the listener thinks they're on the other.

I'd rather not comment on Donald Horne because I haven't followed his career at all (most of it, esp. his opposition to the White Australia Policy, publication of The Lucky Country, etc, having occurred long before I was born - which would be no impediment to comment were I a devout follower of Australia's political history, but I'm only a dabbler, with a lot of other dabblings going on at the same time). If what you're saying, RH, is that many people see someone whose ideas they like and then decide that whatever that someone's ideas are, they'll like 'em, then I agree, it's a problem, and it would be better if those people thought critically. This goes both for the Donald-Hornites (if there are any) and the Windschuttlians (if there are any of those either).

About Me

Alexis, Baron von Harlot, is self-appointed Chronicler Laureate to the principality of Lalor, Victoria, Australia, including the lesser adjoining suburbs of Epping and Thomastown, and wherever she happens to be, really. These annals relay her keenly observed observations on matters floral, faunal, anthropological, protozoic, and thingy, with reference to the backyard, down the road, geopolitics, and the complete works of Jeanette Winterson.